The Modern Era 1
Earth’s Twilight — Chapter 01.1
The double-faced hero
On his navigation log, in date 16 December 1492 C. Columbus reports about the letter he’d sent to los reyes: “Along with these few crewmen I have with me I can easily hop around the islands as I wish, without fear of any provocation of sorts, as I already witnessed how just three of my sailors can easily scare away multitudes of indigenous people only by their appearance. They don’t hold any weapon, have no warrior-like attitude, go around naked and defenseless and are so miserable that a thousand of them couldn’t resist 3 of my men.”
This image of the Admiral with his three men landing in Haiti on the 6th Dec. 1492 and terrorizing myriads of “naked and defenceless” (they counted more than 7 millions upon Columbus’ arrival, only 15 thousand a mere 16 years later!) stormed back to my mind when our Media displayed earlier this year the footage of the Iraqi battalions in disorderly retreat under the close shelling directed by Gen. Schwarzkopf: “Many Iraqis got really scared and I found it amusing” — declared S. Quenn, honoured with a bronze star by torpedoing a foxhole and burying underneath the sand a great number of enemy troops. The official data counts for 1 NATO casualty Vs. more than 1 thousand deaths on the contenders’ side. The mass killings of the Antilles’ Sea on one end and that in Mesopotamia on the other, describe to my eyes, chronologically and geographically, the entire arc of the modern era.
If it’s possible to some extent trace back what preceded it, it is impossible to foresee what is going to happen next. It’s clear nevertheless — this is my whole point — how the historical time of ‘the modern world’ has come to an end. Columbus is the characterizing figure role of this world, a double-faced hero. In his Journal he records day by day the ambitions of his enterprise. The first one is that of a devoted disciple of medieval Christianity who aspires to save the world: convert to Christianity the pagans. The second is that which modern man will relate to: bring back home lots of gold (“May the Lord, in his grace, let me find this gold”: 23 December 1492).
Export propaganda and import wealth: isn’t this, as the names changed, the fundamental genius of our modern times?
To convert the infidels was, from the viewpoint of Christianity, to save the people from sure hell, just as western democracy, today, is the ‘civilized’ set of values we export to ‘help’ the middle east. From Columbus to Schwarzkopf, Western Civilization managed to install itself in every single pocket of earth, not only — and this is the present paradox — for greed of gold, but also on the diffusive cultural wave that propagated worldwide, regardless of the colonists’ real intentions, the conscious awareness of Human Rights. That’s why the history of the Colonial Age is not only one of oppression and predation.
Talking about the British dominion over his country, India, in the midst of the industrial revolution, Kavalam M. Panikkar highlighted the matter as follows: “While the Colonial Government imposed rules that were the negation of the most basic form of social justice, the education system, on the other hand, officially supported and funded by the same institutions, was undermining that order the British were otherwise enforcing with their might. The schools would teach to the kids the ideal of freedom, while the government would do everything it could to supress it”.
This ambivalence was present since the very beginning, with the colonial extermination of the Indigenous tribes in America being counterbalanced, back in Europe, by the audacious proclamation of human rights in defense of the victims, thanks to pioneers such as Bartolomeo Las Casas and Francisco de Vitoria: at the same time of instituting a colonial network we were also setting the bases for the new international law. In fact, Thomas More places his ideal society of Utopia in an island over the Atlantic (to discover it, in the novel, is one of Vespucci’s sailors). It’s significant that the first Mexican bishop, the Franciscan monk Juan de Zumarraga would carry among his books a copy of Utopia. Many missionaries of the mendicant religious orders were followers of Erasmus from Rotterdam: by going overseas they followed the dream of creating, around those primitive people — so mild-mannered and malleable — new Christian communities able to reform the universal church.
It was them, together with the Jesuits, the first to try the venturesome experience of the reducciones, arguably the first original and fecund experiment of mutual exchange between the two cultures. Their aspirations were soon to be overwhelmed and defeated by the strategically combined action of the absolute monarchies of illuminist Europe and of the Roman-Catholic church, in the meantime shifted back to an Eurocentric reactionary mode; but to testimony the not complete failure of that project stands the current history of the Latin-American continent, where opposed to an theology of domination is emerging, with radicated and growing consensus in the population, an ideology of liberation very similar to that preached by the Erasmian Missions about 500 years ago.
The irresistible global expansion of modernity was not, hence, univocal. Intertwined, not always evidently, was a fascination for the principles of human dignity. As Columbus, modern man is double-faced.
To the eyes of the populations already subjugated, and even within our own subconscious — this is epochal news — the two faces of modern man have become dissociated. Modernity as a ‘false conscience’ is nearly over, leaving behind nevertheless, as it fades, an array of teachings and experiments of authentic and absolute value, lessons we can use as precious reference as we finally evade its prison and enter in a new Era.
The new era
This is why I chose Columbus and his 1492 discovery of America as the triggering event of modernity, instead of other possible periodizations. In conventional historiography that journey was the natural extension of the cultural leap we call humanism, a sort of transition from an universality de jure to an universality de facto. A critical review of modernity cannot allow for any accommodating memory of this passage, on the contrary it must overthrow the official narrative denouncing the Western crimes against life and humanity committed right as the humanist revolution was being celebrated in its cities. Its intellectuals circles of the time, all busy rediscovering the humanitas of the ancients, almost didn’t give a notice to the terrible abuses being committed against real men and women on the other side of the Atlantic.
And yet, deep down, right after those circumstances, the collective realization of having entered a new epoch started to gain ground. At the juncture, Europe started to realize of having finally broken the chains with the past and of finding herself in a wholly different phase of her history. “In 1492 we entered, as stated by Las Casas, ‘In this time of ours, so new and so different from all the others’. Since then, the world has become delimited (as the universe became infinite), ‘the world is small’, as proclaimed by Columbus. Mankind eventually discovered the totality in which it is part, while before, it had been a part without the whole.”
To this shift towards a holistic spatial horizon, corresponded a change in the time-frame reference. “European civilization at that time was ‘allocentric’…the golden age was neither the present nor the future, but instead the past, the pre-Christian past of the Greeks and the Romans. The centre was elsewhere.”
In those years, one exceptional testimony, Francesco Guicciardini, after blaming Machiavelli of abusing Greco-Roman references, noted about Columbus’ explorations that “with this disclosure it became evident how the ancients were mistaken to great lengths about the earth”. And “what more it gave many headaches to the priests, who used to interpret the holy passage ‘around the entire earth it went their voice, to the limits of the world came their words’ as if Christianity had to spread on the whole planet.” So, the two main axes on which western culture was founded, the worship of the Classical Age and of the Holy Bible, started to crumble. Beside the view that this new era was a ‘renaissance’ of the old humanitas, evolved the suspicion we were witnessing something more profound than a mere extension of the past, something completely unique temporally and spatially, something that called us to new responsibilities. What responsibilities?
Medieval theocracy had first given her own universalistic worldview to the new era. Then, in the following centuries, the technical and industrial revolutions will imprint with new forms and media this messianic vocation of ours. As he was entering this unfamiliar times, modern man, still hostage to his secular theocratic apparatus, wasn’t able to fully grasp the human development potential implicit in a mutual exchange with different cultures, and opted for declaring himself as the ‘totality’ while resorting to his military might and to the persuasiveness of his gold to force the rest of the world to comply.
Today his western civilization desperately needs to alter its course, to acknowledge being a part of a larger organic whole, and to draw the horizon of the entire humanity beyond its own distinctive traits.
Dark thoughts
There goes explained why the disillusionment indicated 70 years ago by Max Weber as the peculiar trait of modern rationality evolved, progressively, in a sort of ‘end-of-times syndrom’, or as stated splendidly by Ernesto de Martino, into an eschatology without eschaton. We are indeed at the ‘end of history’ but only because we are living since quite some time within the narrative of a story that has lost its end, lacking the ability to make any sense of the changing reality. It’s the desperatio, and naked of the existentialist aura it made it so suggestive in the beginning, it reveals herself today as mere absence of hope.
It’s a revealing fact that Martin Heidegger, the most illustrious of Nietzsche’s commentators, declared just about 15 years ago that neither philosophy nor any other human endeavour can possibly save man from an inevitable downfall.
“At this point only a god can save us”.
And he went on: “Our only hope is to conceive for the acceptance , within our minds and hearts, to either the manifestation of God, or to the absence of God upon our final hours (if God doesn’t show up, we’re finished)”. Heidegger is a suspect witness of the decline of man, given his compliance with the political expression in which the most negative traits of the modern world — the will to power and the refusal of what’s different — entered the realm of madness. But indeed he represents, to date, the current of pessimistic thought that has long since nourished within modernity: Shopenhauer used to teach in Berlin right alongside Hegel!
It was again Heidegger to reacquaint the European public with the writings of Nietzsche, already carrying in them all the motifs of the critique against western civilization, as found in Land des Abend or Abensland, Earth’s twilight. But among most Nietzsche’s followers — both those between the world wars and those of today’s crisis, this critique of modernity — when not limited to naively advocating the return to some pre-Socratic golden age, implies and even justifies the
negation of any collective effort aspiring to put universality in practice.
Zarathustra’s virus, transmitting a sentiment of aristocratic isolation from all democratic passions and common causes, infected for some time even intellectuals that greatly contributed to the cause of a global cosmopolitical conscience, such as Max Weber, Thomas Mann and Karl Jaspers.
Such predictions of a downfall are, finally, functional to the modern status quo since they overlook with indifferent resignation the clear wake-up calls coming from the socio-historical reality, and they are product of a state of conscience that is folded on itself, superficially avoiding the essence of things, and slowly metabolizing the magnificent Weltanschauungen of the beginnings into subtle analytical studies on the inevitability of the catastrophe. It’s no coincidence if philosophy, once at the very foundation of modernity, is dead and when it survives it’s only to find herself degraded, as foretold by Wittgenstein, in mere linguistic analysis.
Yet today the main proposers of the theory of the catastrophe — a fact inconceivable only a few years ago — are the same scientists, constrained by an approach that tries to predict the future based on the statistical observation of the apparent symptoms of our present condition. Even they, along with the doomsday prophets, are to be looked upon with suspicion.
I see how their obsessive and alarming explanations of an approaching apocalypse as really missing out on a number of meaningful positive trends that show us how the match isn’t quite over yet, and exists within mankind a set of intrinsic possibilities incompatible and transcendent to his current form, so that l’homme depasse l’homme. The recent technological advances could grant the founding tools to realize a transition able to unleash all the human potential still hidden or repressed.
The situation we’re in is indeed dramatic, since this transition that offers an alternative to the catastrophe cannot be a simple derivative of the processes currently in act, it requires an additional effort of creative freedom. Allowing for this processes to fulfill themselves with fatalist abandonment, will only lead humanity to follow them down their natural path of self-destruction. The transition implies an abrupt discontinuity with the past, possible only if the hidden potential will overweight those conservative inertias that still govern our present, in other words if humanity will be finally able to reconcile the imperatives of freedom with those of materialistic necessity and become, for the first time in her life, consciously in charge of its destiny.
Nothing stands more deeply opposed to this perspective than the progressive dissolution of all previous human identities into a global dictatorship of big data, leaving man addicted to virtual entertainment and unable to imagine a future. To push him towards this dystopic scenario is that same technology that lately morphed into cybernetics, whose underlying model is a self-regulating, self-determining mechanical system. As he gets more deeply ingrained in this alienating system, man becomes increasingly hetero-directed, incapable of freely mastering his own fate.
One of the best known science philosophers of the recent years, Stephen Toumlin, gave us an authoritative analytical description of this cultural atmosphere, anticipating, maybe hazardously, to the 1970’s the definitive clouding of the ‘historical horizon’, since then ‘hidden in fog and darkness’.
“The European political supremacy has come to an end, and its cultural hegemony is set to follow.
For 200 years the western population believed their civilization had culminated in the modern era, that their agricultural and production techniques, their medical knowledge, were ‘modern’, certain of the validity of their ‘modern’ scientific and philosophical ideas and happy of the relative safety offered them by the ‘modern’ national states. They dealt with every intellectual and practical issue with a specifically ‘modern’ approach; and in a dozen different fields their experience developed a range of rational verification methods and applied them to our institutions and legal procedures, something not available to the tyrannical and superstitious pre-modern societies”.
If for Toumlin the end of modern world corresponds to the decline of Western civilization, for the famous anthropologist Donald Johanson (who discovered Lucy, our three and a half million years-old ancestor) it probably amounts to the complete extinction of homo sapiens. It doesn’t matter, he writes at the end of his last book, “if we disappear following a nuclear disaster or poisoned away by pollution. Anyway, an observer from outer space would come to conclude — along with Darwin, if he could assist to our extinction — that intelligence was only one of the many possible specializations…
Intelligence, that spark between millions of others to appear on the tree of life, revealed herself to be simply this: an intermittent light that turns on and off. When it came the time of the great challenge — to change or to become extinct — she vanished”.
